27-year-old PhD from Ha Tinh and the dream of "open source, open collaboration"

Luong Anh Vu (former student of Ha Tinh High School for the Gifted) is contributing to the open source organization Young Monkeys in Vietnam through the EzyPlatform project, which allows users to integrate components to create software without programming or very little programming.

I looked for a long time at the face of Luong Anh Vu - a thin young man with bright eyes full of aspirations and a friendly, radiant smile in the photo of him receiving his PhD degree at the age of 27 at Griffith University (Australia). His mother is teacher Ngo Thi Luong, who studied in the same high school class as me. At the 40th class reunion, she shared with us her pride in her son and, immediately, we also felt proud and happy with the sparkling joy in his eyes and good premonitions about what this 27-year-old AI Doctor will create in the future...

27-year-old PhD from Ha Tinh and the dream of

Anh Vu received his PhD from Griffith University. Photo: provided by the character.

Vu was born in 1995 and is a student at Ha Tinh High School for the Gifted. With excellent academic and training achievements, in grade 9, Vu was honored at the Patriotic Emulation Congress of Ha Tinh province. In grades 11 and 12, Vu continuously won national awards in informatics and was admitted directly to Hanoi University of Science and Technology (now Hanoi University of Science and Technology).

At university, Vu continued to win many awards: Third prize in the Super Cup Informatics Olympiad - Hanoi University of Science and Technology in 2016; Second prize in the ACM/ICPC Southeast Asia team programming competition in 2017; Third prize in scientific research of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Informatics in 2018.

Through the introduction of the Australian PhD program at the University's Institute of Mathematics, Vu met Dr. Nguyen Tien Thanh - a former student of the Mathematics and Information Technology Talent class, a research specialist at Robert Gordon University (Scotland); Prof. Alan Wee-Chung Liew - Director of the Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Griffith University. From there, he decided to apply for a PhD scholarship in artificial intelligence (AI).

After more than 3 years of effort, under the guidance of Professor Alan, he completed his study program and became a doctor with the thesis topic "Advanced techniques for classification of non-stationary streaming data and applications".

27-year-old PhD from Ha Tinh and the dream of

Anh Vu at the graduation ceremony. Photo: provided by the character.

The content of the topic aims to develop new machine learning methods that allow continuous learning from data streams, that is, as much data as it receives will be used to train the model to overcome the disadvantages of traditional machine learning methods. A large enough data set must be collected to train the model, and when new data is available, it must be combined with old data to retrain from the beginning.

In reality, data streams often change their distribution very frequently and unpredictably, so Vu's topic also proposes new solutions to help the model respond to these changes. The topic studies the fundamental problem so it can be widely applied in many fields, specifically the problems of predicting data streams, time series, or big data. We will encounter many problems of this type, for example, monitoring systems, financial data streams, weather, social networks, etc.

Although living and working in Australia, Vu always wants to contribute something to the development of Vietnam. Realizing that the need for digital transformation in Vietnam is very large, however, most businesses in Vietnam are small and medium-sized, the funding for digital transformation is still very limited, so there needs to be a way to create products with low costs, but still have enough quality and meet the diverse needs of businesses. After working with a number of programmers in Vietnam, Vu realized that open source and open collaboration are the solutions to this problem.

27-year-old PhD from Ha Tinh and the dream of

Anh Vu is programming EzyPlatform. Photo: character provided.

Currently, Vu is contributing to the open source organization Young Monkeys in Vietnam through a platform project called EzyPlatform, which allows users to integrate components to create software without programming or very little programming. Furthermore, Vu wants to apply AI to this platform to automatically program to help users reduce from 85% to 100% of technical work, helping them easily create software that meets all their needs.

When writing about Vu, I sincerely believe that his ideas will become reality, that Vu and his colleagues will popularize open source products and bring value to society, to his hometown Ha Tinh, a land where the dream of digital transformation to serve people and businesses exists, and is identifying digital transformation as a strong driving force for socio-economic development.

27-year-old PhD from Ha Tinh and the dream of